9 Ways to Stay Productive While Working From Home

Jul 21

woman working at home on laptop with cat

Staying productive while working from home is an art and skill that’s essential in today’s working world. If you’re an entrepreneur running an online business, or an employee/contractor responsible for certain job duties with your employer or clients, learning how to stay productive is key to meeting your goals and deadlines.

You probably fall into one of 3 categories as a work-from-home entrepreneur:

You’ve been working from home for years as an online entrepreneur.
You started working from home during the pandemic (or recently).
You have some sort of hybrid situation with your employer.

I have worked from home since 2015 and there are many, many things that I've learned over the years that I want to share with you in an effort to help you work better so you can live well.

This article contains affiliate links — which means I may earn a small commission on products I recommend. You’re helping me afford my coffee habit and I’m getting to share my favorite stuff — win-win!

Productivity Tip #1: Have a wind-down routine the night before

Setting yourself up for a productive day starts with the night before and having a wind-down routine.

The quickest way to kill your productivity is to get a crappy night's sleep, which often happens when you have a whole bunch of electronics in your room. Going to sleep with your phone right in front of your face and all that blue light and stimulation is just not good.

Not to mention the doom-scrolling, troll comment reading, bad habits of getting sucked into social media.

The number one change I made in the last couple of years is to charge my phone outside of my bedroom.

This change has affected not only the quality of my sleep but my mood, my attitude, and how I feel starting my day and ending my day.

My bedroom really has become a quiet sanctuary where I get to rest both my body and my mind.

Here are some ideas to create your own wind-down routine:

I love to take a warm shower at night, ending with cold water for at least a couple of minutes (read more about cold exposure here). I feel clean, refreshed, and relaxed.
I replaced my phone alarm with a Hatch Restore. It’s an investment, but I wish I had made it sooner. It’s a sound machine, smart light, reading light, sunrise alarm clock, AND you can create a personal sleep routine to help you wind down.
This salt lamp diffuser sets the mood to warm and cozy, with the added benefit of diffusing essential oils.
Shoot for the same bedtime every night. I shoot for 9PM (don’t laugh, my youngest still gets up at 5AM), and I usually read for a bit before lights out.
If you love to read before bed and use a Kindle (I do too), enable a blue light filter for the screen.

However you create your routine, the goal is to detach and let go of your day, and set yourself up for restful sleep.

Productivity Tip #2: Set your intention for the day

Before you start work, turn on your computer, and before you start clicking around and shuffling things around on your desk, make sure you set your intentions for the day.

And before you set your intentions, take a minute to ground yourself. This is the same concept as winding down the night before — you really just want to take a beat and take a breath before you jump into your day.

What I do personally is 10 to 15 minutes of meditation in the morning. Sometimes that's complete silence where I'm just tuning in to the noises I can hear. Sometimes I will listen to some sort of binaural beats or meditation tracks. Sometimes it's a guided meditation.

I don't do anything super specific — I just go by what feels right for me on that morning.

Click here to check out my saved YouTube playlist of favorite mediations.

After I feel like my head is clear and calm, I’ll write down my intention for the day in my planner.

Here are some common ones that come up for me over and over:

Today will be full of fun and ease with my work.
Today I will look for opportunities to serve and help others.
Today I will show up as my best self.
Today I will be present and focused on the task at hand.
Today I will pause and breathe before responding or making decisions.

Just the act of consciously choosing an intention and writing it down serves as an undercurrent for the day.

PRO-TIP FOR THE MAMAS:

If you have Littles, chances are you might not have time for a morning routine or much time to yourself first thing in the morning.

My morning routine of meditating and setting an intention doesn’t happen until the kids are out of the house and I’m ready to get to work for the day.

Productivity Tip #3: Know your priorities for the day

Knowing your top priorities is super helpful when you feel like you’re grinding through your to-do list and the important stuff doesn't really happen or get done.

Or maybe critical projects keep getting put off because you're not doing the important things — you're overloading yourself with too many not-important things (ahem, like checking your email and Instagram messages).

It’s so much easier to stay productive when I know exactly what needs to be done on any given day.

PRIORITIES PRO-TIP:

If you have a compressed day and you are a busy work-from-home parent like I am, you probably don't work from eight to five.

I typically work half days every day because of the priorities we have for the rest of our life, so I don't actually have time to get three work priorities done.

Try setting two work priorities and one personal priority.

The personal priority I set is usually a health habit I want to make sure I do, like going for a walk or drinking water. So if you feel like you have a time-crunched, really compressed day because of your schedule and your other priorities in your life, try that tip to have one personal priority.

The other tip that I have for this habit is to not do anything else before you get at least one of your top priorities done.

I don’t even open my email Inbox before priority #1 is accomplished…which leads us to the fourth way to stay productive.

Productivity Tip #4: Stay out of your email inbox

Once you’ve grounded yourself, set your intentions, and know your priorities, I recommend checking your calendar and your project management system to start your day, not your email.

Too many of us habitually work out of our email inboxes, and that is what sets the tone for our day — it becomes our default to-do list.

What you're doing is reacting to what everybody else needs from you, instead of being proactive with your business and what you need to do to grow your business.

Email is never the place to start your day.

There are a lot of tips and tricks you can do from pausing your inbox to just not even opening it.

And once you have your top priorities down, you need to know what else is going on with your day.

Do you have meetings, anything going on with your personal life, or appointments? Whatever it is, check your calendar and project management system.

A project management system doesn’t have to be fancy (I created Theme Day Planning Method on a spreadsheet), but whatever you use, you have to actually USE IT.

You have to check in with it, make it work for you, and develop a routine with it for it to be effective.

So the first thing I do when I turn on my computer in the morning is check in on my calendar and project management to see what I need to do to keep my business moving forward.

Email does not enter into the picture sometimes not even until the end of the day, but certainly not during the first couple of hours in the day.

Productivity Tip #5: Group similar tasks together

It’s super easy when you're working from home and you've got a million things on your plate to have 50 tabs open on your computer and in your head as well.

When you group similar tasks together, you have less context switching. Context switching is when you stop doing something and you go do something else and you lose a tremendous amount of brain power, energy, and time in trying to on board with whatever this next task is that you're doing that doesn't have anything to do with what you were just doing 30 seconds ago.

What I teach in Theme Day Planning Method is how to eliminate as much context switching as possible so you can get more of the right things done in less time.

theme day planning method by cara chace mockup banner

Let’s recap your day so far:

You (hopefully) got a good night’s sleep,
grounded yourself and set your intention for the day,
written down your top priorities,
checked your calendar and project management for the day,
grouped like tasks together so you can get in a good block of time that is going to minimize that context switching.

So on a typical day, this takes us through the first couple hours of the morning. Everybody is different, but for me personally, the first couple hours of my day, are when I'm the most productive, the most creative, and I have the most energy for work.

I am excited to get to work every morning.

I am thrilled with the possibilities of the day and the productivity that I know I'm going to have and what I'm going to create.

Those first couple of hours, really just have a lot of juice for me.

But sometimes, once you get through the first few hours of focused work, you might start losing the thread of productivity and focus for the day.

You are starting to feel tired and like nothing's working. You might fall into a “clickhole” at your computer and don’t really know what you need to be doing. This is also the time you might get distracted by your inbox or social media.

I'm here to tell you, I could almost bet money that it's because you need to hydrate and you need to eat something healthy.

Productivity Tip #6: Hydrate and eat something healthy

When I started my business in 2015, there was this thing that would happen almost every single day around 02:00 p.m.

I would get into this kind of Chicken Little doomsday mindset.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, “My business isn't working. I'm just going to go get a job. I’m too tired to do it all.”

All those thoughts would spin around in my head almost every afternoon, and it really felt like whiplash. I would start the morning really excited and energetic and ready for the possibilities of what I was creating…

And then by the afternoon, I’d want to call it a day and crawl under the covers.

Well, what was happening was that because my day was so compressed and I knew I had to pick up kids between 2 and 3 o'clock, I would work straight through lunch and I wouldn’t make sure I was drinking water.

And what was happening was because my body wasn't getting what it needed, my lizard brain was going into fight or flight mode.

One of the ways I solved this is I bought a fantastic water bottle that I use (it has a straw because I can drink from a straw so much quicker).

In our previous home, when my office was not close to the kitchen, I actually had a water cooler in my home office to make that easy for me.

The realization that the state of my body was directly affecting my productivity and mindset was a game-changer for me.

I already mentioned that one of my top 3 priorities for the day is something for my health and this tip is why. Even the act of writing down what I’m going to have for lunch helps because when you wait until you're hungry and exhausted and you're in a “clickhole”, you're not going to make good food choices.

You're going to want chips and crackers or something fatty and salty and all of that, that's not necessarily going to fuel your body or your brain in the best way (No? Just me?)

Even if it's just as simple as, “I'm going to make a smoothie for lunch today”, it’ll help. You don't have to meal plan and have seven mason jars all ready to go in your refrigerator to make this happen.

Just one day at a time, one meal at a time. Huge difference.

Productivity Tip #7: Use your do not disturb settings

Do Not Disturb settings are available on your:

Phone
Desktop/laptop
Email
Messaging (like Slack)

My daughter was born in 2013. I turned my ringer off and have never turned it back on.

That was the first step I made in the direction of taking back control of my time and attention.

Now I have Do Not Disturb set on my phone from 7 PM until 7 AM. Obviously, I stay up later and I get up earlier than those hours — but those are not times that I want to be checking notifications or emails or jumping on social media or anything like that.

On my computer, if I’m going into a focus block where I'm working hard on a project that I'm excited about for 90 minutes or 2 hours, I will turn on the Do Not Disturb settings on my computer, so I'm not getting notifications or pings at all.

If you use Gmail, it has this really great feature called Pause inbox and you can tell it when to come back on so that you're not getting the pings and you're not seeing unread messages.

Emails can often be the most tempting distraction, and here’s why:

It makes us feel like we're getting something done, but typically they aren’t things that build a business.

Sure, some emails need to be taken care of in a timely manner, but probably not right when the email comes in.

But we get into this mistake of feeling like we are getting things done when we're in our email inbox.

But the opposite is true — you are actually wasting time instead of doing things like your top three priorities for the day.

So use that pause inbox feature on Gmail!

Productivity Tip #8: Pause and reset

Sometimes, even when you’ve set yourself up for a productive day and you’re hydrated and fed, you still reach a point where your brain is just done.

When you’ve been working hard and you’ve been focused and using your creativity, you can’t force yourself to keep working at the same capacity.

It’s like pushing a wet noodle.

When you reach this point, it’s a good time to pause, take a breath, stretch, or go for a walk outside.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a 15 minutes reset nap. I have a favorite YouTube video that is 15 minutes of binaural beats with a bell to wake me up. It’s magic.

And while I hate to admit it, doing a quick workout like this one makes me feel refreshed too. I always thought the people who recommend working out to feel better are kind of obnoxious, but turns out a quick bodyweight workout does the job.

Whatever works for you, just see what you like doing to reset (it might be different from day to day).

I can tell you from vast experience if you keep pushing after you’ve hit that point of diminishing returns, a 15-minute reset won’t be enough and you’ll be useless the rest of the day.

Productivity Tip #9: Take time to complete your day

My final tip for staying productive while working from home is to actually complete your day.

There are many, many times when I have left my home office thinking that I would get back to work after I pick the kids up or after I did this or that or whatever.

The reality is that doesn't often happen.

But what does happen is my desk is left with all of my work from the day and it’s a discombobulated mess.

When you leave your office or desk this way, you haven't actually completed your day — the act of which is super important to touch base with what you need to do for the next day.

Most importantly, it lets you “leave work”, even though you're working from home.

Closing out my day and preparing for the next helps me not have those open loops in my brain when I’m trying to spend time with my family and ease into my evening routine.

Here are some ideas for you to complete your day:

Jot down any notes about unfinished work or to-dos in your project management system (I have an “Open Loops” document in ClickUp.)
Review your planner for what priorities you accomplished (such a good feeling!) and look at the next day to plan a loose agenda.
Put away pens, books, notes — anything you have out that has a “home” where it should go.
Clear any dishes or water bottles you still have on your desk.
Turn off the light, push in your chair, and take a moment to thank your space.

This ritual takes me 20-30 minutes (sometimes less), and saves me hours the next day because I know where I need to start with my day and I’m not dealing with a cluttered desk and mental to-do list.

You’ll be set up to come back to Productivity Tip #1 — having that wind-down routine the night before.

It's a full and complete cycle to help you minimize distractions and open loops in your brain, while staying in focus and flow with your work and taking care of yourself and your energy.